Abstract: Separation of propylene-propane mixture using
immobilized liquid membrane was investigated. The effect of transmembrane
pressure and carrier concentration on membrane
separation performance was studied. It was observed that for 30:70
(vol. %) propylene-propane mixture, at pressure of 120kPa and
carrier concentration of 20wt. %, a separation factor of 474 was
obtained.
Abstract: Over recent years, the number of building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) installations for home systems have been increasing in Malaysia. The paper concerns an analysis - as part of current Research and Development (R&D) efforts - to integrate photovoltaics as an architectural feature of a detached house in the new satellite township of Putrajaya, Malaysia. The analysis was undertaken using calculation and simulation tools to optimize performance of BIPV home system. In this study, a the simulation analysis was undertaken for selected bungalow units based on a long term recorded weather data for city of Kuala Lumpur. The simulation and calculation was done with consideration of a PV panels' tilt and direction, shading effect and economical considerations. A simulation of the performance of a grid connected BIPV house in Kuala Lumpur was undertaken. This case study uses a 60 PV modules with power output of 2.7 kW giving an average of PV electricity output is 255 kWh/month..
Abstract: The improvement of irrigation systems in the Nile
Delta is one of the most important attempts in Egypt to implement
more effective irrigation technology by improving the existing
irrigation networks. Demand delivery system in the existing irrigation
network is using of mechanical gates structures to automatically
divert water from one portion of an agricultural field to another in the
desired amount and sequence. This paper discusses evaluating main
irrigation networks system under the government managed before
and after improvement systems in the Nile Delta. The overall results
indicate that policy of using the demand delivery concept through
irrigation networks is successful by improving water delivery
performance among them than the rotation delivery concept that used
before. It is provided fair share of water delivery among irrigation
districts and available water in the end of irrigation network,
although this system located in an end of irrigation networks in the
Nile Delta.
Abstract: Heat pipes are two-phase heat transfer devices with
high effective thermal conductivity. Due to the high heat transport
capacity, heat exchanger with heat pipes has become much smaller
than traditional heat exchangers in handling high heat fluxes. With
the working fluid in a heat pipe, heat can be absorbed on the
evaporator region and transported to the condenser region where the
vapour condenses releasing the heat to the cooling media. Heat pipe
technology has found increasing applications in enhancing the
thermal performance of heat exchangers in microelectranics, energy
saving in HVAC systems for operating rooms,surgery centers, hotels,
cleanrooms etc, temperature regulation systems for the human body
and other industrial sectors. Development activity in heat pipe and
thermosyphon technology in asia in recent years is surveyed. Some
new results obtained in Australia and other countries are also
included.
Abstract: Two Amphiphilic catalysts, iron (III) dodecylbenzene
sulfonate and nickel (II) dodecylbenzene sulfonate, were synthesized
and used in the catalytic aquathermolysis of heavy crude oil to reduce
its viscosity. The prepared catalysts exhibited good performance in
the aquathermolysis and the viscosity is reduced by ~ 78.9 % for
Egyptian heavy crude oil. The chemical and physical properties of
heavy oil both before and after reaction were investigated by FT-IR,
dynamic viscosity, molecular weight and SARA analysis. The results
indicated that the content of resin, asphaltene, average molecular
weight and sulfur content of heavy oil is reduced after the catalytic
aquathermolysis.
Abstract: The winding hot-spot temperature is one of the most
critical parameters that affect the useful life of the power
transformers. The winding hot-spot temperature can be calculated as
function of the top-oil temperature that can estimated by using the
ambient temperature and transformer loading measured data. This
paper proposes the estimation of the top-oil temperature by using a
method based on Least Squares Support Vector Machines approach.
The estimated top-oil temperature is compared with measured data of
a power transformer in operation. The results are also compared with
methods based on the IEEE Standard C57.91-1995/2000 and
Artificial Neural Networks. It is shown that the Least Squares
Support Vector Machines approach presents better performance than
the methods based in the IEEE Standard C57.91-1995/2000 and
artificial neural networks.
Abstract: Time interleaved sigma-delta (TIΣΔ) architecture is a
potential candidate for high bandwidth analog to digital converters
(ADC) which remains a bottleneck for software and cognitive radio
receivers. However, the performance of the TIΣΔ architecture is
limited by the unavoidable gain and offset mismatches resulting
from the manufacturing process. This paper presents a novel digital
calibration method to compensate the gain and offset mismatch
effect. The proposed method takes advantage of the reconstruction
digital signal processing on each channel and requires only few logic
components for implementation. The run time calibration is estimated
to 10 and 15 clock cycles for offset cancellation and gain mismatch
calibration respectively.
Abstract: Performance of any continuous speech recognition system is highly dependent on performance of the acoustic models. Generally, development of the robust spoken language technology relies on the availability of large amounts of data. Common way to cope with little data for training each state of Markov models is treebased state tying. This tying method applies contextual questions to tie states. Manual procedure for question generation suffers from human errors and is time consuming. Various automatically generated questions are used to construct decision tree. There are three approaches to generate questions to construct HMMs based on decision tree. One approach is based on misrecognized phonemes, another approach basically uses feature table and the other is based on state distributions corresponding to context-independent subword units. In this paper, all these methods of automatic question generation are applied to the decision tree on FARSDAT corpus in Persian language and their results are compared with those of manually generated questions. The results show that automatically generated questions yield much better results and can replace manually generated questions in Persian language.
Abstract: The paper presents a new hybridization methodology involving Neural, Fuzzy and Rough Computing. A Rough Sets based approximation technique has been proposed based on a certain Neuro – Fuzzy architecture. A New Rough Neuron composition consisting of a combination of a Lower Bound neuron and a Boundary neuron has also been described. The conventional convergence of error in back propagation has been given away for a new framework based on 'Output Excitation Factor' and an inverse input transfer function. The paper also presents a brief comparison of performances, of the existing Rough Neural Networks and ANFIS architecture against the proposed methodology. It can be observed that the rough approximation based neuro-fuzzy architecture is superior to its counterparts.
Abstract: Small-scale RC models of both piles and tunnel ducts
were produced as mockups of reality and loaded under soil
confinement conditionsto investigate the damage evolution of
structural RC interacting with soil. Experimental verifications usinga
3D nonlinear FE analysis program called COM3D, which was
developed at the University of Tokyo, are introduced. This analysis
has been used in practice for seismic performance assessment of
underground ducts and in-ground LNG storage tanks in consideration
of soil-structure interactionunder static and dynamic loading. Varying
modes of failure of RCpilessubjected to different magnitudes of soil
confinement were successfully reproduced in the proposed small-scale
experiments and numerically simulated as well. Analytical simulation
was applied to RC tunnel mockups under a wide variety of depth and
soil confinement conditions, and reasonable matching was confirmed.
Abstract: The interaction between wakes of bluff body and
airfoil have profound influences on system performance in many
industrial applications, e.g., turbo-machinery and cooling fan. The
present work investigates the effect of configuration include; airfoil-s
angle of attack, transverse and inline spacing of the models, on
frequency behavior of the cylinder-s near-wake. The experiments
carried on under subcritical flow regime, using the hot-wire
anemometry (HWA). The relationship between the Strouhal numbers
and arrangements provide an insight into the global physical
processes of wake interaction and vortex shedding.
Abstract: Developers need to evaluate software's performance to make software efficient. This paper suggests a performance evaluation system for embedded software. The suggested system consists of code analyzer, testing agents, data analyzer, and report viewer. The code analyzer inserts additional code dependent on target system into source code and compiles the source code. The testing agents execute performance test. The data analyzer translates raw-level results data to class-level APIs for reporting viewer. The report viewer offers users graphical report views by using the APIs. We hope that the suggested tool will be useful for embedded-related software development,because developers can easily and intuitively analyze software's performance and resource utilization.
Abstract: Activity-Based Costing (ABC) which has become an important aspect of manufacturing/service organizations can be defined as a methodology that measures the cost and performance of activities, resources and cost objects. It can be considered as an alternative paradigm to traditional cost-based accounting systems. The objective of this paper is to illustrate an application of ABC method and to compare the results of ABC with traditional costing methods. The results of the application highlight the weak points of traditional costing methods and an S-Curve obtained is used to identify the undercosted and overcosted products of the firm.
Abstract: Non-stationary trend in R-R interval series is
considered as a main factor that could highly influence the evaluation
of spectral analysis. It is suggested to remove trends in order to obtain
reliable results. In this study, three detrending methods, the
smoothness prior approach, the wavelet and the empirical mode
decomposition, were compared on artificial R-R interval series with
four types of simulated trends. The Lomb-Scargle periodogram was
used for spectral analysis of R-R interval series. Results indicated that
the wavelet method showed a better overall performance than the other
two methods, and more time-saving, too. Therefore it was selected for
spectral analysis of real R-R interval series of thirty-seven healthy
subjects. Significant decreases (19.94±5.87% in the low frequency
band and 18.97±5.78% in the ratio (p
Abstract: This paper developed the c-Chart based on a Zero- Inflated Poisson (ZIP) processes that approximated by a geometric distribution with parameter p. The p estimated that fit for ZIP distribution used in calculated the mean, median, and variance of geometric distribution for constructed the c-Chart by three difference methods. For cg-Chart, developed c-Chart by used the mean and variance of the geometric distribution constructed control limits. For cmg-Chart, the mean used for constructed the control limits. The cme- Chart, developed control limits of c-Chart from median and variance values of geometric distribution. The performance of charts considered from the Average Run Length and Average Coverage Probability. We found that for an in-control process, the cg-Chart is superior for low level of mean at all level of proportion zero. For an out-of-control process, the cmg-Chart and cme-Chart are the best for mean = 2, 3 and 4 at all level of parameter.
Abstract: The aim of this study is to identify the conditions of
implementation for reconfigurability in summarizing past flexible
manufacturing systems (FMS) research by drawing overall
conclusions from many separate High Performance Manufacturing
(HPM) studies. Meta-analysis will be applied to links between HPM
programs and their practices related to FMS and manufacturing
performance with particular reference to responsiveness performance.
More specifically, an application of meta-analysis will be made with
reference to two of the main steps towards the development of an
empirically-tested theory: testing the adequacy of the measurement of
variables and testing the linkages between the variables.
Abstract: This paper proposes two novel schemes for pilot-aided
integer frequency offset (IFO) estimation in orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM)-based digital video broadcastingterrestrial
(DVB-T) systems. The conventional scheme proposed for
estimating the IFO uses only partial information of combinations
that pilots can provide, which stems from a rigorous assumption
that the channel responses of pilots used for estimating the IFO
change very rapidly. Thus, in this paper, we propose the novel IFO
estimation schemes exploiting all information of combinations that
pilots can provide to improve the performance of IFO estimation.
The simulation results show that the proposed schemes are highly
accurate in terms of the IFO detection probability.
Abstract: Road authorities have confronted problems to
maintaining the serviceability of road infrastructure systems by using
various traditional methods of contracting. As a solution to these
problems, many road authorities have started contracting out road
maintenance works to the private sector based on performance
measures. This contracting method is named Performance-Based
Maintenance Contracting (PBMC). It is considered more costeffective
than other traditional methods of contracting. It has a
substantial success records in many developed and developing
countries over the last two decades. This paper discusses and
analyses the potential issues to be considered before the introduction
of PBMC in a country.
Abstract: Ad hoc networks are characterized by multihop wireless connectivity, frequently changing network topology and the need for efficient dynamic routing protocols. We compare the performance of three routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), location-aided routing (LAR1).Our evaluation is based on energy consumption in mobile ad hoc networks. The performance differentials are analyzed using varying network load, mobility, and network size. We simulate protocols with GLOMOSIM simulator. Based on the observations, we make recommendations about when the performance of either protocol can be best.
Abstract: In this paper, an efficient technique is proposed to manage the cache memory. The proposed technique introduces some modifications on the well-known set associative mapping technique. This modification requires a little alteration in the structure of the cache memory and on the way by which it can be referenced. The proposed alteration leads to increase the set size virtually and consequently to improve the performance and the utilization of the cache memory. The current mapping techniques have accomplished good results. In fact, there are still different cases in which cache memory lines are left empty and not used, whereas two or more processes overwrite the lines of each other, instead of using those empty lines. The proposed algorithm aims at finding an efficient way to deal with such problem.